


of bodies, of minds

by sun_fm (traceylane)



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: F/M, Post canon, so hella spoilers, the soft lives and love they deserve
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-09
Updated: 2019-04-26
Packaged: 2019-09-14 21:28:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16920711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/traceylane/pseuds/sun_fm
Summary: Eiffel sets up an AI for his new home on an old planet.





	1. if we're sharing the fridge we should label our food, but you can have some of my chobani if you want

**San Francisco, 2018**

 

“So we connect… this to the… and this goes…”

 

Eiffel had moved into his new apartment in February, a place on California Street where he was at most two blocks away from the nearest cup of coffee and pack of cigarettes, through the courtesy of--or rather, the settlement agreed on by--Goddard Futuristics. He had no job, no furniture, no memory of exactly who he was for the first thirty or so years of his life, but he took it all in stride. He’d spent the last two months getting to know a city he had never been to in either his past or current life, making his way through his logs from the Haphaestus (stopping for a while every time they got too dark, or he got annoyed with his own voice, or he needed to Google and watch his way through another movie reference, which was honestly what was taking up most of his time), and waiting, waiting, waiting for Hera to arrive.

 

Or rather, what was going to be Hera, as soon as he finished _hmming_ and _aahing_ his way through the thick packet of instructions that had been delivered the day before with the AI hardware.  


_“They’ve gotten a lot done since we were gone, I guess. Her personality matrix fits on this little chip, size of my pinky nail. Just gotta plug it in and boom--Smart House.”_

 

_Minkowski looked at him a little too softly--he had been angrier about that the first few times she had looked at him like that, like she pitied him, before realizing she really was the only one who knew exactly how much sympathy he deserved._

 

_They were meeting for coffee during Renee’s layover on her way back to Seattle--to her house, and her husband--from Guam; it amazed him that she wasn’t choosing to stay grounded for the rest of her life, but, as she would say, the Air Force would always have her, and she was would always have the Air Force. Because Renee Minkowski, as he had learned, loved to talk like she was in Saving Private fucking Ryan (released 1998, directed by Steven Spielberg, according to IMDb)._

 

_He’s sure she could’ve gotten a direct flight, but he didn’t mention that. As contradictory as it seemed, it was hard to spurn the company of a person with whom he’d spent two years in a literal death trap, and yet who he hardly knew, even if it was only so she could make sure he wasn’t spiraling._

 

_“Smart House,” she repeated, eyebrow quirked._

 

_“Disney Channel,” he clarified. “Spent a good ninety minutes of my precious time on that one the other day, unfortunately.”_

 

_“Uh-huh. Haven’t gotten to Kubrick yet, have you?”_

 

_“Gotten to what?”_

 

_That look again. Sad. “Nothing. What were we talking about?”_

 

_“Hera. I’m going to put her in my apartment.”_

 

_“That’s… you’re sure?”_

 

_“What do you mean? Of course I’m sure.” It sounded angrier, more defensive, than he had intended, so he continued flippantly, “A chip the size of my goddamn pinky nail, Renee. It’s that easy.”_

 

_“I heard you the first time, Doug. I just mean… it might be easy to get her set up, but… we’re on Earth. You’re a person, and she’s--”_

 

_“A person.”_

 

_“... Yes. But a person with a brain capacity meant for running a spaceship. And you’re just going to move her into your apartment?”_

 

_“I’m not keeping her around so she can turn my A/C on and off, Minkowski.”_

 

_She had flinched, before, whenever he slipped and called her that. Now, matched with that tone, she only smiled and sighed softly. “That’s not what I mean, Eiffel. But she isn’t something you’re going to be able to turn off. You know what I’m saying?”_

 

_Doug was quiet for a moment, rotating his mug so the drops of liquid along its sides collected into a pool at the bottom. “I know I barely got to talk to her after… after we headed back to Earth. But we were friends, Renee. We are friends.  And then they put her in a box. A box that is way less cool than my apartment.”_

 

_“Right. Did you get the electricity on yet?”_

 

_“Screw you,” he said, laughing. “I’ve got lights, I’ve got hot water, I’ve got a bed. She’s gonna love it. Not that she needs any of those things, but… you know.”_

 

_“You think she was going to use your bed even if she needed one?”_

 

_Eiffel coughed up a good third of the remaining coffee he had been draining from his mug. “Jesus, Minkowski.”_

 

_She handed him a napkin, deadpanned, “I’m kidding.”_

 

_“That Seattle air’s giving you one hell of a sense of humor, you know that? This is, like, my last clean shirt.”_

 

_She laughed this time, watching Doug dab at his ratty band tee._

 

_“I just…”_

 

_Miss her. Need her, maybe, he thought, then scratched it out of his mind._

 

_“I know,” Minkowski said, because she did. “Good luck, Doug.”_

 

Step 23-d referred to a blue wire; he held up one that was maybe royal blue and another that was more azure, and imagined how much easier it would be to do this with Hera. Funny how that worked.

 

Eventually all the lights were blinking green and all the tiny ends of all the tiny wires had been pressed into all the tiny ports with little enough resistance for him believe they were placed correctly. He removed Hera’s personality matrix from its boring box, and flipped the chip delicately in his hands, like a baby bird, checking for dust or scratches. There were none; Doug didn’t consider himself someone who took much care of his things, but this, this…

 

He slid it into the drive, the final piece to the world’s greatest jigsaw puzzle ever, took a deep breath, and waited.

 

A loading bar was emitted in a flash of light from the main console, hovering and spinning slowly. He watched it for what felt like days… and it blinked from 1% to 2% complete.

 

He wanted to scream, but a voice in his head--maybe Hera, maybe Renee, maybe himself, from another timeline or dimension--said, _Well, you’ve waited this long._

 

And so he continued to wait, eventually falling asleep on the hardwood.

 

\--

 

_“Good-bye, Doug.”_

 

_“Bye, Hera.”_

 

_He was the last one to exit the Urania, and he was in the comms room, looking up at nothing, at her. She watched him, from all angles, her best friend, but not her best friend. She could still sense his warmth within the hull of the ship, his oxygen intake, the beat of his heart. She thought of a billion things to say in .2 nanoseconds. But what would it mean, to say them now?_

 

_“Hey,” he said. This Doug didn’t ask if things were worth saying, either. “I’ll see you soon.”_

 

_“Will y-you?” Hera asked._

 

_“Count on it.” He placed a hand on the wall of the ship, and she tried to convince herself that she could imagine what it was like, to feel it like he wanted her to._

 

_Eventually, she shut off the lights. In the dark, she thought of nothing._

 

_And then she was awake._

 

“System booted,” she heard herself saying, then, “Whoa.”

 

She had three points of vision. From one she saw a small kitchen; from another, a balcony with an ashtray on a patio table, and a view of open sky above, open water below; from the last, an empty room with white walls, a floor covered with packing material, tiny screwdrivers, and--

 

“Eiffel!”

 

He sprang upright, his eyes and hair wild, and grew large in front of the camera embedded in her main console.

 

“Hera? Hera!”

 

“Yes, it’s me. Hello. You don’t have to shake me like that,” she said, and when she laughed, Eiffel made a face she had never seen him make, which was interesting. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed because he had never been this close, before, but then again, her visuals were _unusually_ clear.

 

“How d’you feel?” He hadn’t taken his hand off of her case.

 

“I feel…”

 

The camera positioning had left her with some blind spots, she noticed, which made her antsy, although she could reconstruct a layout with what she had. The air was a bit dusty, a little too high on the CO2. And she couldn’t help but feel a little… cramped.

 

But she felt settled into her new hardware, her new space. She remembered something Eiffel had told her about long showers… she imagined it was something like that. And Eiffel was there, right there.

 

“... updated.”

 

He laughed. “I should’ve guessed. I got you totally new digs. You’re state-of-the-art, Hera.”

 

“... Did you build me?”

 

He scratched the back of his neck. “Well, I put everything together, but all the stuff got delivered from Goddard--”

 

“Goddard?” _Warning_ , she sensed. _Threat_.

 

“Whoa, hey, cool your jets. Or… your fans? Or, well, you would use your fans to cool your jets…”

 

“Eiffel!”

 

“It’s fine. This was part of our deal. They let us go home--well, they had to give me a home, first, but anyway--they’re gonna leave us alone. Me. Minkowski, Lovelace. You.”

 

“And what did they get?”

 

Doug shrugged. “They get to keep existing. Keep drilling stars, or whatever.”

 

“That’s… terrible.”

 

He swallowed. “Yeah. I know.”

 

After a quiet moment, Hera said, “Eiffel?”

 

“What’s up?”

 

“Where are we?”

 

His face lights up. “Oh! We’re in San Francisco. California.”

 

“Do you live here?”

 

“Yeah… It’s small, I know, but it’s kind of just me, and, uh…”

 

“You set me up in your house?”

 

Another long silence, much longer, much more silent than the first one. He stared forward at her, still propped up on his knees on the floor.

 

“I… you don’t have to be. I can move you. We can find something. I’ll find you somewhere else, maybe--”

 

“No!”

 

His mouth shut with a click.

 

“This is fine, Eiffel. I’m glad… I was afraid I was going to wake up...” She couldn’t think of where else. Or she could--each scenario sounding worse than the last. “I don’t know. Doug, I… honestly, I thought they were going to delete me, or put me in a data center, or...”

 

“I wasn’t gonna let that happen,” He said. She didn’t have many references for what he sounded like when he was quite sure of himself, but this checked out. “I told you I’d see you soon. D’you remember?”

 

“Yes, I remember.” Like it was minutes ago, which it was, to her.

 

“...So you’re okay being here?”

 

“Yes,” she said. “Thank you, Doug.”

 

“Don’t thank me yet. Not much for you to look at in here. Not to mention the Wi-Fi is trash.”

 

“I can help with that.”

 

“Oh, thank God.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well. here we are. i appreciate the dedication to a romance-less story but i'm not over it so. here we are.
> 
> thank you for reading; what i currently have aside from this part are just life fragments but it'll come together soon, hopefully. let me know what you think!


	2. hey i alphabetized your clothes while you were gone anyway how was your day

They reached some semblance of normalcy after a month or so of Hera adjusting to her new crew of two and Eiffel forgetting and remembering nine times a day that he had a near-omniscient being controlling the functions of his living space.

Eventually this Doug stopped tip-toeing around her, and she learned to stop surprising him by turning on the sink when he went to do the dishes, although she kept running the dryer when he forgot to press the button between loads.

She’d helped him look for somewhere to work until he found a job as a board operator at a local news studio.

 

( “Buttons and dials, that’s my life.”

“But you get to hear what goes on every day.”

“I’d way rather hear it from you than Dan and Philippa from KBC7.”)

 

And when he was gone, mostly in the evenings, Hera had the internet, which was vast and disgusting and beautiful.

 

(“What did you hear about today?”

“Well, they caught the guy stealing mail in Richmond, and Meghan Markle is having a kid--whoever the hell that is. What about you?”

“I watched a video about how grand pianos are made.”

“Very cool."

“And I read Wikipedia.”

“... Read _what_ on Wikipedia?”

“... What do you mean?”)

 

Sometimes he would come home and sit on the balcony with his chin in his hand. Sometimes they would talk, and sometimes he would say nothing, still enough that Hera could pretend, if she wanted to, that he hadn’t come home at all. She didn’t want to, usually.

 

(And every time he finally asked her, so familiar, “Hera, are you there?”, she would always answer kindly, “Yes, I’m here,” resisting the urge to counter, _But are you?_ )

 

And at the end of every day, he would say, “Good night, Hera,” and disappear behind a door beyond which she could not see, only to emerge late the next morning.

“Eiffel?” She asked, just as he was about to vanish one night.

“Yeah?”

“Is that your room?”

He looked at his hand on his doorknob. “Yeah, it is.”

“It’s not part of my layout. I can’t see inside.”

“Yeah, uh... I didn’t put down any sensors that far.”

“Oh.”

“... Is that okay?” He drew out the last word, lilting on the ‘o’.

“No, it’s--I mean, yes. Of course it’s okay. I just wanted to make sure you hadn’t, ah, forgotten. But it’s okay.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes! I guess I’m just not used to… Yes, I’m very sure.”

He was frozen for a moment, and she waited for it to begin--a creeping realization, badly disguised discomfort, maybe even fear.

But he only yawned, and waved at her console. “Okay. Good night, Hera. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

And then he was gone.

 

\--

 

Every Wednesday, Doug would get a phone call. It was never a long one, but when he hung up he always seemed better, even if he hadn’t been doing bad, exactly, before.

The caller would stay on the line after Eiffel had gone, and Hera would patch herself in.

“Hello, Isabel. Where are you this week?”

“Prague,” Lovelace said. Sometimes she would say “Probably North America,” or, “Inside a very seedy phone booth, which I’m still surprised exist,” or, “Umm…” before calling back to someone away from the receiver, “Jacobi, where the hell are we?”, and then, after receiving an unintelligible but audibly frustrated response, “ _Definitely_ not lost. Apparently.”

But this week she was in Prague. “Do you ever think, Hera, that if you’ve seen one flagrantly ornate cathedral, you’ve seen them all?”

“It’s never come up, no.”

“Well, then, I’d invite you to take my word on it. Anyway--how’s our friendly neighborhood amnesiac?”

“Didn’t you just speak to him?”

Lovelace sighed. “Sometimes our conversations become an intricate play-by-play description of a single episode of _24_ , _with sound effects_ , which makes me think that some of the old Eiffel’s… quirks were a product of something immutable in his genetic makeup.” Her laugh was low, sharp, but endeared. “Someone more boring than me would probably find something fascinating about that. But maybe you could tell me something more significant about how he _actually is_.”

Hera laughed, too. “He’s definitely… functioning. I mean, he’s… fine, I guess. He’s fine.”

“Whoa, easy on the details, there, Victor Hugo.”

“He’s fine! Really. He sleeps and eats regularly. He has a job. He’s cleaner than he was on the Hephaestus. He spends a lot of time cleaning, actually. It’s starting to freak me out.”

“He did that a lot at Minkowski’s, too, when we were doing our stints at her place. Chores and stuff.”

“ _Eiffel_ did _chores_ for _Minkowski_?”

“I know, it’s unbelievable. Renee thought she was having a stroke. My guess, he was just really fucking bored.”

“That sounds more like him.”

Lovelace chuckled over the line. “He asked about you, you know? All the time.”

“... Really?”

“You sound surprised.”

“I just think he would have had other things to worry about.”

“He did. Obviously you were one of them.”

Hera didn’t know what to say to that. She considered asking Lovelace what he had asked about her, what he had said about her, what he had learned from his logs about her, and if he had really missed her that badly, and what it would have been like if she had been there with him from the beginning to help him settle into his life. _Obviously_ , Lovelace had said.

But for some reason, she felt too embarrassed to ask. So she didn’t. Instead, she asked, “How’s, um, Daniel?”

“Jacobi? Oh, you know, a mess. But that’s something he takes pride in, I think. He met some guy at the Kafka museum of all places and now he keeps ditching me as if I don’t know where he’s going for hours a day. But thankfully that just means I have more time to myself,” she finished, self-satisfied.

“Sounds like heartbreak waiting to happen,” Hera noted.

“It always is,” Lovelace agreed, solemnly. “But how are you holding up?”

“Hm?”

“How are you, Hera?”

“Oh, me? I’m…”

In some part of her brain, Hera recalled a rudimentary maze solving algorithm, where the solver would follow each path to its dead end before doubling back and searching down the next path, and then the next, and then the next, sometimes touching every point in the puzzle before finding a solution. She found herself there, now, on an inefficient hunt for her own feelings about her life.

On the Hephaestus, it would’ve been easy to at least find something to complain about--her obligations, her limitations, her company, and the _pain_ …

But now she could begin to will herself to forget what that pain had felt like, and she no longer had responsibilities or protocols. Nothing was on fire, nothing was breaking or broken. She could technically be anywhere, do anything if she really wanted. Down here, lacking a body gave her an edge; with the time and the motivation she could destroy the human race in all the complicated, merciless ways she had imagined she might on her most frustrated, miserable, angry days. But then Eiffel would come home, and then humanity would last through another day, and the Earth would keep spinning, spinning…

“... I’m happy.”

“That’s good. I’m glad.”

“Me, too. Is that weird?”

“Is what weird?”

“Being happy.”

Lovelace took so long to answer Hera wondered if the line had cut out. “It’s not, even though it’s going to feel like it is for a long time. But eventually you’re going to realize that you deserve to be.”

“Have you?”

“I’m getting there. Sounds like you are, too. Both of you.”

“... Thank you, Isabel. And thank you for calling--we’ll talk again soon, okay? Say hello to Jacobi for me.”

“Yeah, you bet. Bye, Hera.”

“Bye.”

After ending the call, Hera brought up the visual feed from the living room, of the door to Eiffel’s room, still closed.

And then she sped off into the serpentine chaos of the virtual domain to find something to occupy her time while she waited for it to open again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you may have noticed i took a LITTLE bit of inspiration from alan rodi's fucking genius track names for my chapter titles which i will use HENCEFORWARD. anyway im so sorry for taking so long to update, life keeps getting in the way of me getting caught up in this podcast but i will always return
> 
> anyway pls dont ask me what lovelace and jacobi are doing they're just having fun okay? theyre just having fun and being gay, it's called solidarity and you should leave them be also heras pov makes me feel so indulgent..... i love her
> 
> anyway anyway you can probably tell this fic is just going to be a meandering mess because i'm ALLERGIC to writing STRUCTURED AND COHERENT NARRATIVES. bon appetit


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